Chicago mayoral hopeful Amara Enyia omitted one-third of her income on her 2017 federal tax return, the latest in a series of money missteps for a candidate who is campaigning as a public finance expert, a Tribune investigation has found.

Enyia did not report to the IRS $21,000 paid to her by Chris Kennedy’s governor campaign, where she worked as a consultant for several months.

Contacted by the Tribune, Enyia acknowledged the error, but offered different responses to explain it. At first, she blamed the Kennedy campaign for not providing her a tax form in a timely fashion. Later, Enyia said she forgot to give the form to her accountant.

“That was an oversight. That’s just basically it,” she told the Tribune.

Enyia, 35, has seen her political star rise during the mayoral campaign as she pairs support from celebrity rappers and a savvy social media strategy with credentials that include a law degree and doctorate in education.

But as she cuts an increasingly high profile among the large field of candidates, a closer look at her history reveals Enyia struggling with her own personal finances.

Enyia, who is asking voters to elect her to run a city with an $8.9 billion budget, has been sued over rent and student loans, faced a lien for unpaid federal taxes and been fined tens of thousands of dollars for failing to file quarterly campaign finance reports.

Asked what her financial troubles say about her readiness to be mayor, Enyia said they are a result of her decision to work in public service.

“There are many things I could have done that would be more lucrative because I do have a vast amount of credentials and experience. I could make a lot of money if I wanted to. But I’ve made the decision to work in spaces that are not lucrative,” she said. “To me, drawing a line between, if you can’t manage your personal finances, you can’t manage the city’s finances, is a very faulty line.”

Enyia’s most significant government job, as village manager of south suburban University Park in 2017, quickly ended amid disagreements over her salary demands and concerns about whether she was spending enough time at Village Hall.

Tax problems

The Tribune first asked for Enyia’s tax returns on Nov. 1. She did not release the returns by the Dec. 1 deadline the Tribune had given to all mayoral candidates.

Nearly three weeks after the Tribune published a story on the tax information it had received from other candidates, Enyia released two years of returns on Jan. 2. She now acknowledges that when she released the documents, she knew the 2017 return was incorrect, but she did not mention the error.

In addition, Enyia did not disclose her work for the Kennedy campaign when she filed the required financial interest statement with the Chicago Board of Ethics on Sept. 14 after declaring her mayoral candidacy, the Tribune found.

The Tribune discovered that Enyia underreported her income after identifying that her publicly disclosed earnings from the year — gleaned from University Park records, state campaign finance disclosures and Chicago Board of Ethics filings — far exceeded what she claimed on her tax return.

Asked to explain why she did not report the Kennedy campaign earnings, Enyia, through a spokesman, initially attributed the error to the Kennedy campaign’s bookkeepers.

“The income was not reported in the 2017 taxes because of how late the 1099 forms came in, but they will appear in this year’s tax files as an amendment to her 2017 filing,” Enyia spokesman Sean Anderson said in a Thursday email. A 1099 is an IRS form used to document income other than wages and salary, commonly used by contractors.

During a Friday afternoon interview with the Tribune, Enyia changed the explanation of what happened.

“I didn’t have it at the time. I didn’t know I didn’t have it,” she said of the tax form early in the interview. “That document was not in my possession when I submitted them to my accountant.”

Later, after the Tribune told Enyia that former Kennedy campaign officials said the tax forms were distributed by Jan. 31, 2018, she said he might have had the 1099 contractor document but just forgot to include it.

When she gave her accountant tax papers to file her 2017 return, Enyia said she included several documents related to resolving an existing federal tax lien for failing to pay taxes in earlier years, and she did not include the Kennedy campaign 1099 form.

Asked how she missed disclosing one-third of her income, Enyia said, “It is a significant part of the income but, again, this was not in the documents when I submitted them.”

Enyia also said her earlier statements attributing the error to a late-arriving document was not an effort to blame the Kennedy campaign for her mistake.

By filing a tax return that omitted the $21,000 she was paid as a Kennedy campaign contractor, Enyia claimed that she was owed a refund of more than $2,800, according to her tax return. Enyia said she is now working with her accountant on a payment plan to pay all the taxes she owes.

Taxpayers are obligated to declare all of their known income when they file and can do so even without a 1099 form, tax experts told the Tribune.“You should not be filing without reflecting what you’ve been paid,” said Charlotte Crane, a tax law professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law.

Enyia acknowledged she has underpaid her taxes in the past. In March 2017, the IRS placed a $9,668 lien against her for unpaid taxes between 2011 and 2015, according to public records. The tax lien filed with the Cook County recorder of deeds lists unpaid tax balances associated with Enyia’s Form 1040 tax return filings for four years — $3,311 in 2011, $1,288 in 2012, $350 in 2013 and $4,718 in 2015.

Enyia’s spokesman initially said the lien was issued because “an undiscovered clerical error listed her with children, though she clearly has none. That has since been corrected and she’s paying it on schedule.”

Later, Enyia said the lien was the result of incorrectly filling out tax withholding documents when she took a job in 2011 for a year with a community group, Austin Coming Together.

“I don’t want to say that it had to do with dependents, whatever the withholding — what they were supposed to withhold — it was less than they were supposed to take out,” she said.

Enyia said the amount owed to the IRS ballooned over the next few years because she was unable to pay the original tax.

“The error was from that first year, but every year you’re filing different taxes, but if that issue hasn’t been resolved, if you haven’t paid it off, it’s still going to be accruing fees because it hasn’t been paid off,” she said.

“You can go back and forth with the IRS, but even as you’re doing that, they don’t stop assessing fees,” she added. “They’re pretty significant fees. (Because of) inability to pay, in my case, it ends up being almost $10,000.”

Enyia declined the Tribune’s request to provide tax returns or other documents supporting her explanation of the tax lien.

She said her mistakes in filing her taxes also are related to her low income.

Working in public service “put me in a position of financial hardship, and that’s what it is,” she said. “The tax situation that you and I talked about extensively, is nothing unusual for individuals who don’t make a lot of money. And I think a lot of Chicagoans actually resonate with that.”

University Park job

During a late-night voter registration event with Chance the Rapper in January, Enyia railed against the notion that she should have to disclose her tax returns, a common request for officials running for major public office.

“The only way the status quo wins in this city is when they convince you that you do not have power, when they pull out the mythology that the way things are the way things have to be, when they tell you messages over and over, that you are too young, that you’re black, that you’re not a multimillionaire,” Enyia said from the edge of a dimly lit stage at the Emporium Arcade Bar in Logan Square as supporters cheered. “They want to see your taxes, so they can judge you based on income.”

After claiming just $10,642 in income in 2016, according to her tax return for that year, 2017 was a more lucrative, if rocky, year for the public policy consultant.

That May, University Park hired Enyia to be its village manager. Village records show she took the job without a contract in place, and her tenure immediately ran into trouble involving political squabbles and trustees who balked at paying her what she was asking — a salary of $126,000 to $180,000, which she said would be commensurate to what managers in other suburbs made.

While some trustees and residents criticized her for not being in the office on a daily basis, Enyia said she was often in the field meeting with businesses and other government entities, trying to put out fires related to the town’s longstanding financial troubles.

Critics bristled when Enyia’s ally, Mayor Vivian Covington, claimed at a June 2017 board meeting that Enyia’s legal expertise had saved the village $7,000 in legal fees.

A resident asked if Enyia was a practicing attorney. She is not.

While she did graduate from law school, Enyia said she has never taken the bar exam because she always wanted to work in the public policy realm rather than as a lawyer. Enyia said she never presented herself as a practicing lawyer, and village attorneys handled the suburb’s legal business.

Candidate Amara Enyia participates in a Chicago mayoral candidate forum on Dec. 11, 2018, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Candidate Amara Enyia participates in a Chicago mayoral candidate forum on Dec. 11, 2018, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)

Covington stands by her assessment that Enyia’s law school degree saved the village thousands in legal fees.

“Most people do not have the legal language, or understand, so most people turn to an attorney. But she had that language,” Covington said in a recent interview. “So some things that would normally go to an attorney, we didn’t have to.”

But by July 2017 it was clear that the Village Board was not going to agree to a contract with Enyia. The following month, it agreed to pay her $31,387 for the work she had done since March, and then parted ways.

“She wanted too much money,” said Village Trustee Oscar Brown, who believed that Enyia already was thinking about running for mayor of Chicago while she was running the village. “She couldn’t commit to the village of University Park, and we have serious issues ourselves.”

Also in August 2017, one of Enyia’s student lenders filed a lawsuit against her in Cook County Circuit Court for $17,800 in what it said were unpaid loans from the 2005 school year, when she was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Enyia said she has met with the lender’s attorney and has worked out a payment plan. The attorney for the lender did not respond to request for comment.

In September 2017, Enyia’s financial fortunes took a turn for the better. She signed a $3,000-a-month contract with Kids First Chicago, an education policy nonprofit backed by the Commercial Club of Chicago to provide part-time consulting services, the organization’s CEO said.

Enyia helps with “drafting communication releases and connecting to folks on the West Side,” said Kids First Chicago CEO Daniel Anello, who added that the job typically entails about five hours of work a week, sometimes more.

The following month, Enyia joined the Kennedy campaign as a $6,000-a-month policy consultant, former campaign officials said. State campaign finance records show that she was paid $21,000 in 2017, and a total of $40,500 by the time the campaign ended with Kennedy’s loss in the March 2018 Democratic primary.

She helped work on policy positions about jobs and small businesses, as well as outreach to minority communities, said former Kennedy campaign manager Brendan O’Sullivan.

“She brought a lot of good input to the issues that minorities face in this city and across the state,” said O’Sullivan, who now works for one of Enyia’s mayoral rivals, Gery Chico.

Kanye West covers fine

A relative unknown, Enyia announced her candidacy for mayor in August 2018 to little fanfare. When Chance announced he was endorsing her in October, the popular rap artist’s backing gave her campaign immediate visibility that elevated her far beyond her past experience as an community activist and consultant.

That same day, the Tribune revealed that Enyia owed more than $73,000 in fines to the Illinois State Board of Elections for failing to file campaign fund disclosures after her failed 2015 mayoral bid.

E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune

Mayoral candidate Amara Enyia campaigns with Chance the Rapper, left, on Oct. 23, 2018, near 63rd Street and Cottage Grove Avenue in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood. Chance announced he was endorsing her in October, giving her campaign immediate visibility.

The fines from her first mayoral campaign were not Enyia’s only financial difficulty from 2015. She also faced an eviction lawsuit from the landlord of her Garfield Park apartment in 2015, alleging she had failed to pay her rent. The landlord later dropped the legal action and now says filing the suit was “his error.”

“I love her and hope she wins,” said Juan Jose Juarbe, who asked the Tribune not to write about the lawsuit because although it was filed in Cook County Circuit Court, he considered it “personal.”

While Enyia dealt with mounting debts, she also wore multiple hats in the nonprofit world. She has served as the executive director of the Austin Chamber of Commerce for several years.

High on her resume, Enyia lists herself as the founder of another nonprofit organization, the “Institute for Cooperative Economics and Economic Innovation.”

The organization has no website of its own, but occupies a page under the “programs” tab on a site belonging to Blue1647, a nonprofit technology innovation center based in Pilsen.

Blue1647’s founder said he worked with Enyia on the economic innovation idea but it was in a nascent stage when she turned her attention to politics.

“It was just starting to coalesce, and we didn’t really have any formal relationship,” said Blue1647 founder Emile Cambry Jr. “And then she kind of transitioned to become a candidate.”

Enyia also lists Blue1647 on her resume, stating she has been a “senior advisor” to the organization since 2013, and served as its president in 2017.

The Tribune asked Cambry if Enyia has had a role or title with his organization. “No,” he said.